The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
A report is a way of presenting and conveying information, and is useful in many fields (for example, scientific fields, financial fields, political fields, and/or the like). In many fields, computer programs may be written to programmatically generate reports or documents from electronic collections of data, such as databases. This approach requires a computer programmer to write a program to access the electronic collections of data and output the desired report or document. Typically, a computer programmer must determine the proper format for the report or document from users or analysts that are familiar with the report or document. Some man-machine interfaces for generating reports or documents in this manner are software development tools that allow a computer programmer to write and test computer programs. Following development and testing of the computer program, the computer program must be released into a production environment for use. Thus, this approach for generating reports or documents may be inefficient because an entire software development life cycle (for example, requirements gathering, development, testing, and release) may be required even if only one element or graphic of the report or document requires changing. Furthermore, this software development life cycle may be inefficient and consume significant processing and/or memory resources.